924-955: Athelstan, Edmund I and Edred

The next quarter century sees three Kings of Wessex - Athelstan (924-939), son of Edward the Elder, Edmund I (939-946), half-brother to Athelstan and Edred (946-955), his brother. The Welsh, Scottish and Danish sub-kings' oaths of allegiance to Edward the Elder were renewed in 926, indicating that England was now well established as the overlord of Great Britain. It is already getting close to the imperial multicultural model that is central to the later United Kingdom.

In the following year, England's northern frontier is established at the River Tees with direct rule by the English King over the Danes of York. Clearly the sub-kings are not entirely happy with the overlordship arrangements. Two subordinated kingdoms (the Scots and Strathclyde), directly invaded by the English, combined with the Danes who had founded Dublin to challenge Athelstan only to be defeated at the important battle of Brunanburh in 937.

Overlordship is converting steadily into effective control of the island by the English. There is a Danish rebellion in Mercia and Northumbria in 945 when Edmund works with rather than against the Scots. Edmund, however, is murdered by an outlaw, Leofa, in own hall (Pucklechurch, Gloucerstershire) indicating that this remains a rough and ready and, in some respects, barely civilised society.

Edred continues to be troubled by the Danes. York fell to Eric Bloodaxe in 947. Bloodaxe makes himself King of York before being driven out in 848. Bloodaxe's successor, Anlaf Sihtricson, is then ousted by Bloodaxe in 952. Edred's response is to invade York and Northumbria, driving Bloodaxe out in 954 towards the Solway Forth. Bloodaxe is ambushed and killed in the Stainmore Pass in the Pennines. It is probably from this date that we can start to say that England is unified within the frontiers that we broadly know today.

900-924: Edward the Elder & the Creation of England

Alfred the Great is succeeded by Edward (only called the Elder to distinguish him from a later King Edward) in 900, reigning until 924.  The first quarter of the tenth century is defined by the roll back of the Danes, the creation of a viable idea of England as island-wide and by what amounts to the progressive sanctification and 'orientalisation' by the Church of the Monarchy, seated in a national capital at Winchester.

The first test of the treaties made under Alfred was an attempt by the men of Kent in 902 to oust the Danes from East Anglia which failed, although the Danish ruler of the East Anglians, Eric, was killed at the Battle of the Holme. However, the Anglo-Saxons are now stronger and better organised than the Danes. The reconquest of the Danelaw starts in earnest from 910. The warrior princess Aethelflaed, Edward's sister and wife of the Ealdorman of Mercia, Aethelred, was no shrinking violet but took on the role of 'Lady of the Mercians' when her husband was killed in 911. She not only ruled her husband's domains but expanded them, seizing Derby in 917 and ruling until 920. Thanks to her and the Mercians' efforts, the Northern frontier of England was extended to the Dee-Wash line.

Meanwhile, Edward reconquered East Anglia and the rest of Southen England under Danish independent control in 918 and accepted the submission of the Welsh Kings of Dyfed and Gwynedd. By 919 the Viking Kingdom of Jorvik (York) under its new ruler Ragnald had also acknowledged the overlordship of Edward. By 920 Edward ruled as overlord all Southern Britain as far as the Forth-Clyde line, uniting the area (at least notionally) for the first time since the Romans. In 923 Edward even received the submission of the King of the Scots.  Alfred the Great is rightly regarded as 'Great' for having saved England existentially but the making of England as a sovereign entity that was more than just a large Wessex may be put down to his now less well known successor.

As for the sanctification process which helped to link the fortunes of the Anglo-Saxons as a people to their Kings as divinely sanctioned, this is exemplified  by the transfer of the claimed body of King Edmund of East Anglia (murdered in 870 by the Danes) to be buried with full rites at Beodricsworth (later Bury St. Edmunds).

835-848: The Arrival of the Danes

After the initial raids on Northumbria and Iona in the 790s, there were a further set of raids (three in all) on Iona in 800, with 68 monks killed on one occasion alone. This severely undermined its position as a Northern cultural centre. The Vikings appeared again in 825 at Iona, killing the Bishop and several monks and setting the settlement alight. By 850, the important treasures of Iona are being brought inland to Dunkeld by the Picts - other items were transferred to Ireland. Scotland may be on the edge of English and European affairs but is equally plagued by the Viking threat. The Pictish King is, for example, killed by the Danes in 839. In Ireland, the Danes found Dublin as their premier trading station and power base in 841. All this intense pressure may have had something to do with the increased unity of Scotland: in 844, Kenneth MacAlpin, a Pictish King, began the process of creating the Kingdom of Alba, merging the Picts and the Scots into one proto-nation.

The Southern British may have been horrified as Christian men by events in Northumbria and Iona but they may also have been complacent. That complacency ended in 835 when the Danes began to raid the Kentish coast. The Danish threat to England crystallised in the following year when Egbert of Wessex was defeated by an army made up of the men of 25 Danish ships at the Battle of Carhampton in Somerset, in the very heart of Wessex. The Danes appeared again in 838, this time in alliance with the Cymri of Cornwall, but Egbert (who died in the following year after a long 37 year reign) defeated both at Hingston Down so that the Danes and Cornish were forced to withdraw. Egbert was succeeded by Athelstan, a son, as sub-King of the small Kingdoms (Kent, Sussex, Essex and Middlesex) and by another son, Ethelwulf, as King of Wessex, indicating once again a tendency of the Anglo-Saxons to divide before they unify.

The Danes reappeared in 840, not merely to raid and to leave but to survive through the winter on English soil. The armies are increasing in size as well. In that year, Ealdorman Wulfheard has to beat off 37 shiploads of raiders at Southampton. Another Ealdorman, Aethelhun, has to fight them off at  Portland but is defeated and killed while there is a slaughter of Saxons in the Romney Marshes with the killing of Ealdorman Herebryht in the following year. This force then undertook a programme of murder, rape and plunder along the Kentish, Essex and Lincolnsire coasts throughout 841 and down the Thames estuary in 842, killing many in Rochester and London.  The outcome of this particular set of raids was only resolved (temporarily) with a Saxon defeat (led by Ealdorman Earnulf of Somerset and Ealdorman Osric of Dorset) of a Danish army at the River Parrett in 845. There will be more raids to come but Wessex appeared to have had sufficient resilience to mount a military challenge to the raiders when necessary. Whether it could sustain this costly resistance as the Danish armies grew in size, tactical ability and sheer greed would be the issue that would dominate the ninth century.

560-624: The Return of Christian Influence

Christianity can never said to have been eliminated from Britain during the extended time of troubles between the final failure of Rome to guarantee Britain's safety in 446 and the decision of Pope Gregory to send an official Papal mission to the then-most significant Anglo-Saxon Kingdom, Kent, in 596. During that 150 years, Christianity survived and even extended its range to the 'Gaels' beyond the Cymry. It undoubtedly lingered as the religion of the oppressed under Anglo-Saxon rule but without any significant help or leadership from Rome.

There were now several political considerations from the Roman Church's perspective and that of the Anglo-Saxon Kings, no doubt calculated with all the consummate cynicism of such pragmatic realists. First, the continuation of a religion of resistance amongst the Cymri without Papal authority threatened to turn into something that might became heretical, uncontrollable and an alternative focus of loyalty for the unhappy Christians in the North West of Europe. Second, the Papacy had done a great deal to re-establish itself as the cement for Kingship with those barbarians with pretensions to be heirs to Rome generally or locally on the Continent. Its support would be very valuable to rising warlords who wanted both to be respected overseas and command authority over their own chaotic and proud elites and peoples. Third, and connected to the first, stable rule required that the masses who had been conquered accept the new situation and their new masters and lose hope of a return to a former situation. The Church could certainly help with pacifying those Catholic Cymri practising the religion of the oppressed under the yoke of pagan warlordism. Fourth, pagan settlers were a lot less easier to handle with their allegiance to gods of place and struggle than Christians who were taught to seek their salvation in the world beyond through an ethos of passivity and compliance. All that was required was for warlords to aspire to become kings of small settled statelets and the Church would find a ready audience for their 'moral' message. Basically, the Cymri were about to be suckered - and so were the bulk of ordinary Saxon settlers - in a classic deal (we cannot say 'of the devil') between two powerful forces working towards order

But we should not forget those beyond the defeated Cymri. The Church was making separate inroads (with all the prestige of a passing civilisation) amongst those Celtic 'barbarians' who had never been truly conquered by Rome and who were seeking to up their own game as plunderers, the Irish and Scots. A significant figure in this respect is Columba who, based in Ireland, which had received a significant Roman missionary presence in the 430s under Palladius and Patrick, had moved, in 563, to Iona in Scotland to found an important monastery in the Scots Kingdom of Dal Riata. By 574, he is anointing Aedan mac Gebrain as King, showing the important political function of senior religious figures. It is hard not to see the history of Christianity in the British Isles, as it is elsewhere, as primarily the psychological business of creating cultural power for military and economic figures in return for shared control over the population and a slice of the action.

Dal Riata was important as an 'overlord' of the Western Isles, reaching across to the Irish mainland. Columba became Aedan's adviser. In 375, there is a Council Meeting at Druim Ceat in what is now County Londonderry obscure in intent but which seems to have involved a negotiation which weakened the hold of Dal Riata's Irish overlords without recourse to further war. The Church's backing seems to have given a sub-King significant advantage in those negotiations and it entered into its new historical role as consigliere to the bosses amongst the barbarians. Columba died in 597 just as Augustine was settling into Canterbury and within days pilgrims are arriving at Iona, indicating another facet of Catholicism, the popular devotion of items connected to its saints (an early example of the cult of relics and what is now the sale room prices that might be given for Elvis' toothbrush). This popular appeal will constrain Kings as the only power that the masses have left in an age of iron and slavery. It is probably true that the Church dies in proportion to Kings being no longer necessary or powerful.

Towards the end of the sixth century, Christianity has thus already established a magical and cultural role amongst the Irish and Scots (perhaps merely supplanting functionally that of the druidic priests) that the Pope now wants to have accepted by the much more challenging Germanic barbarians. The Church has made enormous headway amongst those barbarians who had been awed by the monuments and culture of Rome on the Continent. It was logical that Gregory should seek to extend that process by sending Augustine to the capital of Kent in 596, probably still the most culturally Roman-friendly of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms and no longer a frontier state. Augustine arrives the next year to persuade Aethelbert of Kent to embrace Catholicism which means if he does so, so does much of Southern England. Augustine becomes the first Archbishop of Canterbury in 597 (although he had probably already been ordained Bishop by the Frankish Church). Catholicism thus returns to Britain. The mission is a success. The Pope sends more resources in 601 in the form of assistants, bringing vital ritual tools (the whole business being not just one of claiming magic but of showing magic to be done). There is then a surge of pastoral activity - he revives the Bishopric of York (there is a strong institutional memory of the old provincial administrative structures within the Roman Church) and appoints Paulinus to it and consecrates two more assistants, Mellitus and Justus, as bishops for the East Saxons in 604. Mellitus gets Bishop of London and Justus Bishop of Rochester so we can see the mission steadily moving into enemy pagan territory.

This is not without its risks. The pagan Aethelfrith of Northumbria in that same year (604) had allegedly slaughtered 200 priests who, like their druidic forebears, had turned up at the battle of Chester to pray for the Cymric forces. We can see the challenge - on one side of the Island, the Church is promising the same sort of support for power granted to Aedan mac Gebrain only a few years before in Scotland to the sort of people who probably believed that Christians were employing their magical, political and religious powers against them on the other side of the island. The question was going to be whether the Church in Rome could guarantee the neutralisation of the magical power employed against the Saxons (not that it appeared to do the Cymry any good) by making it equally available to them and whether that magical power was more politically useful and efficacious than traditional pagan ways. Whether Scrocmail the priest who was one of the fifty who escaped the massacre at Chester would have appreciated Augustine's dealing with the enemy is not recorded by history.

Aethelbert of Kent is converted to catholicism. His son reverts to paganism on acquiring the throne (as we noted in the last posting) but reverts back quite quickly suggesting that there are powerful political motives for abandoning paganism in Kent by this date (616). Augustine's successor, Archbishop Laurentius, who oversees this hiccup, dies in 619. He is succeeded by Mellitus but London reverts to paganism on his departure which suggests that something is enforcing the religion and that its power waxes and wanes with the degree to which religious observance can be 'insisted upon'. History of course is with Christian power. The succession of Archbishops continues with Honorius (note the Latin name) in 624. As with the kings, we will not bother ourselves with episcopal successions, only being interested in those clerical figures who mark major shifts and changes in culture and power. By the end of our period, it is clear that, although Christianity may have only a formal foothold in just one Anglo-Saxon Kingdom and is the ramshackle religion of the defeated everywhere else and those who always were outside the Roman pale, it is to be taken seriously once again in British politics after 150 years in the wilderness.